The CTRM Blog

Patrick and I had a briefing late last week from Michael Schwartz, CMO at Triple Point on the acquisition of Softmar.

Higher commodity prices and volatility have also impacted freight rates meaning that acquiring a platform that caters for freight rates as well as shipping operationally is a good fit within Triple Point’s focus on holistic risk management including market, credit, regulatory and operational risks. Michael stated that Triple Point is seeing a lot more clients focus on the end-to-end P/L of a deal, including looking at the value chain, before going ahead with it and that the Softmar product brings the vessel operations, shipping movements and freight rate trading into that equation.

The two companies have in fact been working together for some time already and have worked out the details of the integration road map and ultimately, Softmar’s product will be available both integrated with CommodityXL and on a stand alone basis. There is a small overlap between Softmar’s product and CommodityXL for Freight and Triple Point intend to support both products as CommodityXL for Freight is a freight rates focused product for smaller trading firms while Softmar is a comprehensive Vessel management and operations product aimed at chartering, vessel operations and trading groups.

Softmar, who are based in Europe and undertake software development in South Africa, already have an impressive client base and there is a good degree of overlap with Triple Point’s existing client base but also great potential, according to Michael Schwartz, for leveraging each others existing client bases.